Choosing Teams by Captains - As a game mode/mod?
slizzered
Germany Join Date: 2014-05-31 Member: 196317Members
Germany Join Date: 2014-05-31 Member: 196317Members
As @It's Super Effective! explained here
http://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/comment/2200926/#Comment_2200926
having "Captains" who choose their teams player by player can be (potentially) a good way to balance teams and even refine the balance over several successive matches. I have seen this to work, but the setup time is sometimes VERY long (10min+) and at least 1 player requires explanation.
So the downsides include: people on a regular NS2 server might not be patient enough for the draw, disagree with the whole idea, miss that the captain called their name, screw up the draw by simply joining a team...
Would you think, a "Captains" game mode could be a solution?
Immediate benefits of the new idea:
Possible downsides of the new idea:
How:
http://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/comment/2200926/#Comment_2200926
having "Captains" who choose their teams player by player can be (potentially) a good way to balance teams and even refine the balance over several successive matches. I have seen this to work, but the setup time is sometimes VERY long (10min+) and at least 1 player requires explanation.
So the downsides include: people on a regular NS2 server might not be patient enough for the draw, disagree with the whole idea, miss that the captain called their name, screw up the draw by simply joining a team...
Would you think, a "Captains" game mode could be a solution?
Immediate benefits of the new idea:
- People can see right in the server browser, that it's not a regular "ns2" server, but "ns2+captains". Therefore you know there will be fair games, but you can't freely join teams.
- Selection of captains and teams can be supported by the mod itself (see below). This prevents players joining teams prematurely and messing up the process.
Possible downsides of the new idea:
- Adds another layer of "bureaucracy" on top of the already existing effort to choose a commander. But it might still be faster than the "manual" captains idea
- More complicated protocol to follow, people might get confused the first time. Again, more guidance than doing captains manually
- I don't know if it would be feasible to implement the ideas, never looked into modding NS2
- Players can't join their preferred race, but have to follow the captain (should not be a problem, actually. The same happens currently when forcing even teams)
How:
- In the Ready Room are 2 "CAPTAIN" tokens. Whoever picks up one of those tokens, is a captain of team A or B. Or have a captain-door. Or type "captain" in chat. The first 2 players become captains.
- Instead of "ReadyRoom, Marines, Aliens, Spectator", there are scoreboards "Unaligned, Team A, Team B, Spectator"
- Captains now take turns pick their team (1-2-2-2- for example) by selecting them from the "Unaligned" scoreboard.
- Since captains do not know every player, the picking process could be supported by displaying some skill-metric for each player. Ideas for metrics: Number of hours logged at ns2stats.com. When the new skill ranking system is functional, maybe use that.
- Once the teams A and B are complete, the captains can join Aliens or Marines. Their whole team auto-joins immediately.
- After the match has started, players can join/leave like in regular matches
- After the match is finished, players remain in their teams A/B. Captains can choose to drop players from their team (this allows to trade players) and pick from the unaligned players improve balance.
- Captains again join Aliens/Marines to start a new match, taking their teams with them. Since most of the teams remain the same, this can reduce delay between matches.
Comments
If this idea goes forward it would also be nice to have some kind of tag the player can choose so captains can see which team they prefer and/or are better at playing. I know most people probably don't care, but I have to imagine that there are at least some people like me out there who only really enjoy playing one side. (for me it's Alien - I'm completely useless as a Marine lol)
As a mod, I don't know if it will work but it might be possible. As you suggest @MoFo, its quite important to have the capacity to kick or remove a captain in case of a troll. In the case of rookies, this mod/concept should not be implemented on rookie servers or normal servers in general thus why we see KKG 150hours+ required and this is important.
Addressing the idea itself, it's actually pretty awesome if you have a bunch of server regulars who know each other, you get extremely close and balanced games for the most part and it is quite competitive as far as pubs go, doesn't match up to 6v6 but its interesting and it works.
The biggest problem I've found so far is the lack of people willing to take the role of captain, sometimes it can take awhile to convince people to take the role and if you get a captain that doesn't know the players then the stacking and stomping just continues.
The most important part of the mod would be to hinder people from joining teams at will (to enforce the picking by the captain).
For ejecting the captain... what about just kicking the player, if he is just a troll? If the server is running the captains mod, the server owner obviously wants people to obey the captains principle. Besides that... I trust in the community ;D
Other stuff like keeping the teams the same after the round or displaying of some skill metric is merely a bonus.
Its funny how ppl are just mentioning it now since its been on our servers for a long time.
A game play mode? Well the Gather system was sort of like that, but then you need people to queue up in there.
People are more willing to do captains, once they feel that the server cannot keep the teams even via "shuffle" or just voiding stacking. Thus servers that already have people are incentivized to stay if it may result in a balanced game.
Now yes, Captains is pretty slow at first, but this gradually gets better the more people are accustomed to it, but also IF THE TEAMS WERE EVEN, then simply swap sides the next round, and you gain some of that time back.
When we decide to play a Captain's game spontaneously, there's always people confused. There's always enough regulars (usually like 10 of us or so total) that we can sort it out and explain to them what it means. I captained a spontaneous captain's game once and it was difficult to pick players because we didn't know their skill level. There would have to be a way to display that. Then we also have the issue of players who don't communicate / aren't cooperating. They get removed and we'll have someone else jump in. It's an easy fix on the TG servers, but what about if I'm on an official NS2 server and nobody has admin? There's a lot of things that would need added and addressed.
I love love love love the mod. I really do. It does great on TacticalGamer and I have a blast every time I play. However, I'm not 100% sure that we'd be able to make it work in Vanilla NS2. It might be up to communities to choose to have/run these mods and ensure that it runs smoothly.
So my point is, if a player you don't know joins these servers, you can screw up the team balance. On top of that, the skill difference in general in pubs is mind-boggling. You can have a decent player to a competitive players eye, but at the same time hes better than everyone else on the server. Its hard to balance teams even with captain games from those 2 factors alone. Players with 0 map awareness and such playing for a balanced game just doesn't work.
I can only suggest pugging and learn from players who know more about the game.
In other words. If a plugin exists which somehow forces two players to be captains, and prevents players from joining teams. If a player tries to join a team, they should get a message "Team captain mode activated". To which would spawn some curiosity as these two captains have a drop down menu of every player in the server (such as the vote kick).
In other words, everything would have to be scripted, plugin enforced, able to use without an admins support, or without people convincing other people how it works.
TL;DR - Bring back siege maps.
People joining the server are forced to obey captains picking. If they don't, they get kicked. If they connect to the server and immediately join a team, they can be told to F4. BUT (and that's important): If there is no enforcing mod, they will delay/interrupt the whole process.
Best thing would be to provide players the right tools to handle captains a little bit more efficiently, instead of forcing them into a very fixed frame of scripted events.
Do you think it might be possible to establish the captains idea firmly enough in the community, so that an additional game mode becomes entirely obsolete? I'm not yet involved enough in the community to decide on that one, but I assume it would require the combined effort of most of the popular servers.
Yes, that's why some display of skill-level would be beneficial, even if not playing captains. If the metric is good enough (I still think a function of total hours played is not too bad), you can at least get an idea about the players abilities and how well he/she can contribute to the team. Although the current "system" of "which teams has the most badges" can give an impression about the stack, it is more than basic and sometimes plain wrong.
The whole display of skill-level thing...ehh I like where that's going but...frankly that has quite a few challenges to overcome. if it did exist then that would be great. BUT then the whole captain thing would be pointless, because then we'd simply be able to properly use the BALANCE TEAMS option or at least have what was needed to make a match making system automated, just saying. That can of worms stops at "how do we calculate and quantify skill"....so ya.
*My post here represents me as a player of this game and does not represent the opinions of any other groups or members thereof to whom I am affiliated with.
My experience was that even with two knowledgeable captains and only mildly tweaked teams, the snowballing nature of NS2 still has the capacity to end in a pretty decisive route. Most pub players would immediately call for rebalanced teams as every loss is a "stack". It's very easy for one player to have an all-star round and that directly translates into a buff for everyone on his team.
Also even if you managed to get a close game server churn often lead to having to pick teams again the next round (instead of just swapping sides).
The major benefit I saw to the captains games were that during these times the server was very actively admin'd which I think had at least as big an impact as the captains.
Some ideas for the mod implementation: There could be a new row in the scoreboard for people in the Ready Room that ties into the new stats system the CDT is working on (some form of ELO), that will at least give a starting point for people to pick teams with.
People are usually pretty quick to learn skill levels of players, just the fact that @schu starting getting picked first is evidence to that.
So much this. You need to know the relative skill levels of all the people you're playing with, their personalities, and everyone needs to be comfortable enough together that getting picked last isn't going to make them feel like trash. I don't see that working in any old random pub.
I built that mod (TGNS) specifically for the TGNS servers and anyone who wishes to play on them. Its code is littered with assumptions that it's running on our servers (with our configurations, core/shared runtime files, etc). The Lua has been open-source since I started (Google "github TGNS"), but -- after She Who Rolls Her Eyes While I Command In The Next Room, kids, work, "life", and modding and otherwise maintaining the TGNS servers and community at large -- I sadly don't have capacity to offer any support beyond sharing the code.
The given captain mod you talk about is made by me and included into the ns2stats beta but tbh it's nowhere near being finished. I would say it's somewhere between alpha and beta.
Due to the lack of time i wasn't able to work at it as much as i would.
But let me shortly show it to you guys:
Basically the mod is going to certain states:
1. Once enough player joined the server a vote for captains is started:
2. After that the captains will pick the players for their teams from the rr and can set their team ready as soon as they got a commander logged in. Once both teams are ready the game starts after small countdown (depends on used settings)
3. After that the status text will be removed for all players who are not in the ready room and new players get automatically assigned to the team with less players (might change).
At those stages players are not able to join or leave the playing teams themselves.
Atm other player can only remove a captain via the votekick or by asking a admin. Also the gui is still a bit "buggy".
Edit: All in the captain menu shown stats are taken from the hive
I've tried to extract TGNS's Captains mode but having only just started out with Lua, I got lost real fast. If any experienced modders want to ply their trade with this endeavor, I can tell you of at least 40 people who would be extremely grateful!
There is most definitely a demand for this "gamemode" in pubs. Experienced players are often telling me that the games on my server have been the best games they've played in recent memory (recently we've been encountering performance issues, but that aside this holds true). I'd totally encourage other admins to set up some NoRookies servers with a captains protocall. You don't need a mod for this to work. You just need to get some regulars who know the drill (two people join a team, then random for first pick, then call out their picks), and some patience.
The worst problem we have now is that it takes longer than normal to get games going. Having to wait for captains, then afks to join, etc. Ghoul's mod manages to cut out on most of those problems.
1. Captains are picked/chosen
2. Teams are randomised
3. Each captain gets to pick 3 players from the other team
It's quicker than normal and usually even yields better results.
Maybe someone can make this into a mod?